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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • That may be, but buying a Mac Mini is like buying a device made from the ground up for Windows, where any other operating system has to reverse engineer 100% of the things to work well, or you have to emulate another OS on it (which comes with its own pitfalls), and it’s 200+€ more expensive than its nearest equivalent.

    Every single company I’ve worked at which introduced Apple Silicon to its developers has had headaches with compatibility. The worst I’ve seen was it taking a developer a month to get up and running because the specific component we used didn’t have a build for the specific ARM architecture. Multipass, UTM, podman, docker desktop, all didn’t work until colima and forcing the VM to emulate x86 + forcing docker in the VM to use the x86 image worked. There was a persistent problem with disk IO since it used 9p or whatever. Installing dependencies from scratch meant waiting 30 minutes on the M2.

    Why pay a premium for less compatibility and worse specs? Just get yourself something that works, which is cheaper, maybe even supports a company that invests in Linux and its ecosystem, and be able to ask an existing developer community instead of asking the subsection of linux users that run your specific app on however you’re running linux on Appe hardware.

    Anti Commercial-AI license


  • The problem with Mac hardware is that it’s ARM and vertically integrated with everything Apple. Not all hardware is supported by Linux because Apple won’t write any linux drivers and everything is reverse engineered. You’re better off buying something non-Apple which linux properly supports.

    If power consumption is an issue for you get, a R9 7950X consumes as much and at times less power than an M1/M2 (I think even M3). Check out GamerNexus’s charts. IINM AMD in W/Ghz performs better than Intel across the board.

    No idea where you are, but you can get a small factor PC from one of the vendors that preload linux, or configure a small form factor PC of your liking for cheap and put linux on it. You’ll get more out of your money for the same or better performance with about the same energy consumption (or a bit more).
    Somebody I know who happens to live in Hungary got himself this cheap beauty. They deliver all over Europe, but if you live elsewhere on this planet, there probably is something similar like this out there.

    Anti Commercial-AI license




  • Free software is like that sometimes.

    Anything is like that. The inventors of a great many things weren’t good people. Just because people do great things, doesn’t mean they are great people. Nazi doctors found out a lot about the human body by torturing them and/or treating them inhumanely. Probably a lot was discovered during the torture of humans and ignoring human rights (which probably didn’t exist at that time).

    Closed source software isn’t better. It’s run by people who devalue their workers, other humans, and in fact the entire world except people like them.

    Anti Commercial-AI license


  • We have heard from multiple people in multiple unrelated contexts that they are hoping for a hard fork of the entire community over the continued inaction on the toxic culture in the Nix project.

    Oh yes, please. My experiences on the nix community forums and matrix have been soured by the actions of high-level contributors. They are simply unable to view things from another perspective and harshly defend their perceived territory. I accept that they make mistakes as we are all human, but they are aware of their positions of power and happily take advantage of it.

    My major problem has been the documentation of the project and how top contributors are unable to accept how bad it is. Discussions about improvements and attempts at improving it at regularly shut down or impeded. Coming back to the “harsh defense of perceived territory”, it distinctly feels like existing teams are supposed to be the only ones making changes to the things they own. Contributions from “outsiders” never exit nix review hell and are nitpicked to death.

    A hard fork doesn’t guarantee existing problems won’t be copy-pasted into a new community (humans be humans), but at least if a new one started there’d be an attempt at resolving existing problems.

    (no, I’m not xz’ist - this is a real person with a real opinion)

    Edit: I realise I don’t have the same issues as described in this open letter which seems to be focused on Eelco. There have been no interactions with the dude, so I can’t judge, but interactions with some high-level nix members haven’t been pleasant.

    Anti Commercial-AI license